H. du Bois

So shoot me, but I thought the review was funny. Didn't bother me that he was reviewing this place. I don't remember, because I'm not OCD about the Times reviews, but haven't they reviewed Lucky Changs or Chez Justine (or La Nouvelle Justine, or whatever its name was)?

Can I quote you on this in the Bruni and Beyond thread?

I thought the whole point of buying an apartment in Manhattan was so that he too could be considered a knowledgeable restaurant goer.

Isn't someone supposed to declare Flushing to be annoying now?

Clearly, the only reason that the 2,465,326 of us living in Brooklyn haven't joined the 1,537,195 of you in Manhattan is that we aren't knowledgeable enough about restaurants to choose to pay the extra rent to live there. Thank you so much for pointing out to us (as we are incapable of understanding or appreciating the superlative) that Franny's is a great place to eat. And that there are great ethnic places in the outer reaches of our borough! WOW!!! Who'd have thought so? I've learned ever so much from this. I can't begin to thank you enough for your knowledge, wisdom and guidance.

New Yorkers would contend that garbage disposals might be the only thing that could ever make Californians feel superior.

I would add bad service and overpriced to the list... u.e. And it's so loud that conversation with your dinner companion(s) is impossible.

When I first moved here, I was told that they were illegal, due to the sewage issues that would be involved if 8.5 million people poured what is essentially puree down the drains. I don't know if that was true or not - I've never read it anywhere. I do know that the plumbing in old buildings here can't handle the outflow from modern appliances. My building is an old Victorian structure, and we're forbidden by lease to have dishwashers or washing machines. Every time a tenant has tried to sneak in a washing machine, all of us end up with their detergent bubbles boiling up into our kitchen sinks via the drains - very gross.

This is simply presumption on your part. I have never been accommodated as part of a couple any more than I have been accommodated as a single if we/I did not have reservations. Never.

I'm usually stuck with ordering the smoked salmon during the intermission (not enough time to eat out first). It does the job, but ...

I'm amazed you were able to find your way to good food at all on a night like that (Valentine's Day and Mother's Day are so not worth dining out). Would the mignardises have softened the blow of the depressing unwed infanticide in Czech?

Megan, you're a class act. Valentine's Day with Miss Austen is the way to go. (I spent mine with Jeeves and Wooster, which was actually a lot of fun). Have you ever read The Jane Austen Cookbook? It's collected from authentic recipes, and is quite interesting, not only in reading about the foods they served, but in its discussion of the type of service used at meals (several sequences called "removes," in which there were displays of food from which people served themselves). Interesting reading. I'll have to take a look at it again tonight, but I remember being surprised at the variety of foods therein - I think that the kitchen gardens and hothouses of the great estates provided a lot more than we'd think nowadays. Keep on blogging! I'm enjoying this very much.

Taste is a relative thing. It is SUBJECTIVE. No one here on the New York boards has any right whatsoever to negate or denigrate the opinions of others, although there has been little else but that on the New York forums in recent months. I am thrilled to see zpzjessica posting here and offering suggestions that differ from the lockstep list of offerings that usually accompanies these threads. Welcome Jessica. Post lots. I for one would enjoy hearing what you have to say. And Beebs, thank you for posting your recommendations from your recent trip to New York. It’s refreshing to hear about which restaurants visitors to our town have enjoyed. We New Yorkers often don’t pay enough attention to that. I hope to see more of you both on these boards.

They sure were. Which ended up being the punch line of a rather funny ordering scenario. After informing us they were out of the chicken, the waitress patiently listened to my litany of successive drink orders (which I was reading straight off the menu), only to interject, "we don't have any ... we don't have any ... we don't have any ..." after each one. Finally I said, "well, why don't you tell me what you do have," and a drink was settled on at last. Then she asked what I would have to eat. I said, "the turkey," and of course her response was, "we don't have any." It wasn't the least bit annoying - we had a good laugh about it. (I think the poor girl was afraid to tell us that half the menu had gone AWOL). Definitely give them a couple of weeks before you go - they're still in deep opening chaos. I don't wish to pass judgment on them until they're on their feet.

Kevin Pietersen and rabbit. 1) Kevin Pietersen plays cricket for England and the Hampshire County cricket club. 2) George Bernard Shaw wrote a play called Pygmalion, in which the character of Eliza Doolittle is taught to pronounce her H’s by repeating the phrase, “in Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen.” 3) Although Shaw was a vegetarian, he oftentimes visited those who were not, and once, on the Riviera, he was the honored guest of Alexander Woollcott. Shaw introduced his wife to another guest there, Harpo Marx, by pulling off Marx’s towel (which he had modestly wrapped about his waist after a round of skinny dipping), revealing all. 4) Marx, who had made a name for himself as the silent brother in the Marx brothers act, was, oddly enough, a member of the famous collection of 1920s New York’s writers and wits, the Algonquin Round Table (which he attributed to his being the only listener amongst a collection of talkers). 5) The Algonquin Round Table were thus named because they congregated at the Algonquin Hotel in the theatre district of Manhattan. The hotel was named after the Algonquin Indians, whose lands ranged wide, but who settled mostly in the province of Quebec. 6) To the west, the Algonquin were neighbored by the Ojibwe tribe (aka the Chippewa), in whose mythology a great rabbit is a deity related to the creation of the world. Ghenghis Khan and baked Alaska.

You know, a few years from now, Crisco is going to make this list.

Don't forget the main reason for the acquisition of new household chattel amongst the mature set - divorce. Having to give up some of your household goods isn't quite the same thing as throwing the old stuff away. My beloved, ancient, well-seasoned cast iron skillet went with my husband, because he had brought it to the marriage (never mind that he never cooked with it). I cashed in my American Express rewards points for Williams Sonoma gift certificates, had the rush of getting a set of All Clad for free, and let the old pots go to my husband, too. The psychology of that act had to do with needing something emblematic of a new life, not that I expect it to make much sense to anyone else. As far as living with a pre-matched set goes, I now have a 2 qt. saucepan that annoys me no end. It's too narrow and too steep, and I don't know what it would have been designed for. Warming a baby bottle in a water bath? If I'd paid real money for it, I'd be seriously pissed off. The rest of the pots are fine - a sensible and very useful collection (one that I couldn't have afforded had I bought it piece by piece). And I still need to get a cast iron skillet, although looking at the shiny new ones always makes me kind of sad.

I read The Art of Eating last year for the first time. Started with An Alphabet for Gourmets, which I think I enjoyed most. How to Cook a Wolf, which is what I'd most wanted to read from having heard about it, was the least interesting of the collected works to me - go figure. I haven't read any biographies of the real MFK, but I've encountered terrible deconstructions of beloved memoirs by factual biographies (e.g., those of Lillian Hellman). It can curdle the pleasure of the memoir, so read the memoir first.

They used to take plays on the road before they hit Broadway for precisely that reason - worked all the kinks out before they made their official debut. Makes good economic sense.

Here's a link to an earlier thread on restaurants near BAM (see below). Scopello and Beisl are both okay for what & where they are, although Beisl's kitchen crew has an annoying habit of blasting a southern blues-rock radio station at full volume when the restaurant's kind of empty. Not that I object to that musical genre, but it isn't necessarily what I feel like listening to under the circumstances. http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showto...0entry1193506

This is turning into a culture war here. I’m glad to see this back on the New York boards. I’m not terribly comfortable with seeing one small remark made by Bryan in a restaurant review being separated out for discussion. Yes, the topic is worthy of it, but in losing the context of Bryan's full review and also of Bryan's larger body of work here, anyone unfamiliar with him might make sweeping judgments about his character based upon one small remark alone. That would be grossly unfair to him. From a cultural point of view, New York City differs vastly from the rest of the country (and from the rest of the state itself). I feel that we’re far more grounded in European culture than we are in that of the mainstream U.S. And that’s part of the problem here. We aren’t talking about binge drinking amongst underage teenagers which often takes place behind the wheel of a car – we’re talking about someone accompanied by his parents who would be drinking a glass of wine with his meal. It’s a part of a highly civilized act within a civilized group of people, and the inclusivity of it demands the exercise of maturity. No one would light up a joint in a restaurant in New York, because that would be bloody rude. Why anyone would equate the two acts is a mystery to me.

I've never had anything less than pristine there (that's why I liked them), but I haven't been there in a while. I'll have to check out Taro.

You know, when I was a kid, they were the thing for birthday parties. And you made them from any cake recipe or frosting recipe you had - you just poured 'em out into the muffin papers instead of a cake tin. They were good. I find the NYC ones to be kind of fun, but awfully sweet, and totally overwhelmed by the icing (not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that - it's probably their appeal). And they're cute. I also think that for the fat fearful, buying one cute, gooey sweet thing is safer than getting a whole cake, which is probably why they're so popular.

Oh, and happy birthday!